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10 thoughts on “Open thread: Happy blogiversary”

While things are still far from ideal, over the past three years I think there’s been a huge change in the level of consciousness in geek communities when it comes to issues like sexism, harassment, and sexual assault. There’s no doubt in my mind that this blog and the wiki have played an instrumental role in bringing that about. So, GF contributors and community, thank you all so much for the work you’ve done to try and make geekdom a safer and more welcoming place for all of us to hang out in.

Current event of note – the “Ladycoders” Kickstarter project tonight had a DDOS attack with 24 hours to go. The project is by three technical women, to put on a training seminar to mentor fellow women. Their site was up again in 10 minutes, but it reminded me of the Anita Sarkeesian backlash.

I just spent a while making some new pages on the wiki. Using the search there is a little disturbing, given the TV Tropes pages dumped in there. Given that TV Tropes has reversed their decision, does it still make sense for the GF wiki to host them?

If we think it does…….. I suggest to move all those pages to a new namespace like TVTropes: that is not checked by default in the search. Because there’s really a bit of an undue-focus thing happening now.

I am trying to think of a succint/snappy term for the attitude that Skud describes as “girl stuff is icky” – I think there was a post about it aeons ago, but I couldn’t find it on GF.org. Maybe it was on Infotrope… had a quick search there, also couldn’t find it. Like I wanted to write in more detail about the thing where sometimes women in minority women environments don’t want to encourage more women to join, because it ruins their own “specialness”, or are happy to keep up barriers because it proves that they are more “hardcore”, that kind of thing. I feel like characterising this as “honorary guy” is not quite the whole story – any ideas?

“the thing where sometimes women in minority women environments don’t want to encourage more women to join, because it ruins their own “specialness”,”

Where that’s ONE woman discouraging others, I’ve seen that called “Queen Bee” — I believe it captures the idea of what does happen sometimes, but I’m afraid the term may be a bit negative-stereotypical towards women. I don’t know another good term for that phenomenon offhand, though.